Shailendra Robin Patel
Chief Financial Officer, Saxo Bank
London-educated Robin Patel has been an integral member of the Copenhagen-based Saxo Bank Senior Management team for the past eight years, prior to which time he held a number of senior treasury management positions. Since March 1999, Robin – in the capacity of Finance Director/CFO – has been responsible for building and organising Saxo Bank’s core operational and service/support infrastructure, which along with the bank’s unique IT capabilities, have been the bedrock upon which Saxo Bank has built its successful online investment trading business.
Presently based at Saxo’s Copenhagen headquarters, Robin has recently assumed more expansive and strategic responsibilities in overseeing and driving the bank’s global business development plans in unison with the bank’s co-CEOs, Kim Fournais and Lars Seier Christensen. Helping to build and develop such a fast growing, successful and multi-national organisation has proven a unique and exciting challenge for Robin’s skills and background as a financial engineer and it’s a challenge that he believes is about to become even more interesting and exciting for the Senior Management team at Saxo Bank.
I began by asking Robin about Saxo Bank’s global strategy for business development, which I discovered for him, personally, meant a great opportunity to put everything the organisation has built up over the years into practice on a much larger scale. As he explains:
“Our strategy right now is very simple, we have a highly successful business model based on facilitation, by which we continually engage more and more clients and partners. The best way to achieve our objectives is to maintain our proven, consistent approach to, and deployment of, our growth development strategy. The key emphasis for us is to maintain our position as the leading global facilitator for online investment trading and to become even closer to our clients, partners, liquidity providers and markets.”
A very recent move, quite literally, for Saxo Bank has been the opening of spacious offices in one of the Canary Wharf skyscrapers, overlooking the new financial heart of London’s thriving Docklands development known locally as Mini-Manhattan.
“We have a very good team actively involved in making sure that not only our offices in London, but also those we’re shortly about to roll out in Singapore, will be up and running as effectively as possible from day one. This requires an enormous amount of co-ordination and planning as well as on-going management to make sure our business development plan is executed as optimally and profitably as possible, while retaining full compliance for our operations and providing exciting new career opportunities for our personnel”
Saxo Bank has gained an enviable reputation for its ethical and innovative modus operandi – both in terms of employment practices and client service provision. I wondered, therefore, how much of a challenge it is to retain these fine ideals when broadening out from Denmark to the new satellite offices?
“It’s a challenge that I, along with my senior management colleagues, and especially Saxo’s co-CEO’s, Kim and Lars, have placed a huge amount of emphasis and focus upon. It’s one of the reasons why we all look forward to the new opportunities that will be created for our organisation, and especially our clients, partners and liquidity counterparts. One of the main challenges we face is to ensure we retain and build upon the successful business model we have striven so hard to establish and retain and expand upon the brand name and market penetration. Equally importantly, we are very focused on developing our personnel and maintaining the corporate vision we’ve worked on over the years – this epitomises how we approach our day-to-day work ethos, especially in relation to our clients and financial partners. We want to really ensure that everything remains fully integrated and is deployed from a cohesive, centralised growth strategy that allows for adaptation to local market practices and client/partner needs, whether that strategy is deployed from our Copenhagen or any other regional office that we may operate throughout the world.”
With that in mind, and perhaps looking forward a little into the future, presumably Saxo Bank has ambitions to open further outposts, globally speaking?
“Yes, certainly. We’re at that stage in our natural growth process where we can deploy our unique service offering from regional operations. Previously, due to the constraints of our limited capacity to support business growth on a large scale, and our technology infrastructure capabilities notwithstanding, we’ve always felt more comfortable facilitating our business from Copenhagen without seeking to invest heavily in regional operations. Instead, we readily engaged with our valuable partners for an effective and profitable distribution model. We’re now at a stage where the Saxo brand is so synonymous with online investment trading in itself – it’s just expanding and accelerating both in terms of investor awareness and investor demand – that, coupled with our existing partner-based distribution model, our own business objectives which are closely aligned with the needs of our 70+ white label partners and tens of thousands of clients from over 130 countries, it’s simply not feasible to continue maintaining that level of quality, that level of service and that degree of scalability without having these regional centres from which to operate from and to secure greater market penetration, significantly more enhanced and closer affinity with our partners whilst maintaining the highest level of product offering and service levels.
“So, London and Singapore are strategic financial centres we identified for a number of different reasons – some common, and others very specific. They, without doubt, represent two important elements of our overall business strategy and fiscal plan for this year. We’re therefore focusing heavily on rolling out these centres, whilst also keeping one eye on other opportunities in Australia, the US, Switzerland and other parts of Europe and the Middle East as well as focusing on gearing up our 4 principal business areas and the internal value chains that support those businesses. We see a number of clear opportunities for continuing our revenue growth prudently and profitably by being closer to our clients and partners in the major markets, whilst ensuring that our product offering, our service levels and especially our personnel development plans retain the optimal quality and success criteria so critical for an innovative business like ours.”
Considering the well-documented and phenomenal rise up the ladder that Saxo Bank has experienced, especially recently, for instance achieving double-digit growth and almost doubling the number of employees to nearly 600 in a very short space of time, would you say that you’ve been taken by surprise by the rapidity of growth?
“No, not taken by surprise, not in terms of the overall thinking and planning. It may not necessarily have been something we envisaged five years ago, but we have always known that if we took each day as it came, kept a very coherent vision allied to a coherent execution strategy for deploying that vision – then we knew there was every chance of becoming the successful organisation that we have built and to proudly offer real, long term and exciting career opportunities to another 600 Saxonians. In this regard, I believe there are two additional key parameters that make a telling contribution for us: One is of course our technology strength, which enables us to leverage our business model very effectively and speedily across the global investor space. The other aspect is our people. We’ve certainly been fortunate in that we have managed to recruit six-hundred highly enthusiastic, extremely loyal and, most importantly, hugely flexible and intelligent employees who are highly engaged from day one in this exciting venture we’ve all built. Knowing that we have the right components in the right place at the right time gives us a great deal of confidence to not only continue our growth, but to actually scale it up… three-, four-, five-times as and when deemed necessary.
“We believe that in our own small way we have helped create very intelligent, easy-to-use access to the global capital markets for investors across the globe. We’ve pioneered state-of-the-art technology which has helped to fundamentally redefine traditional models for bringing attractive investment products and services to our clients and partners. We’ve established ourselves as an important and profitable facilitator for our liquidity counterparts in reaching clients and markets that previously were not accessible to them. But most importantly we’ve built an organisation that has core values and growth opportunities that readily appeal to our personnel – who come with a broad range of skill-sets, backgrounds, cultures and who are ready to embrace the business model and career opportunities that we in the Senior Management team and our principal shareholders have worked so hard to create. This is where our confidence comes from and this remains our focus for our global business development plans.”
And what have been the principal challenges of achieving this growth?
“Well, they’ve been both external and internal. Externally, we’ve made sure that we go out there with a high quality product- and service-offering to our partners and clients, not to overlook having the means to be able to facilitate and engage in dialogue with them, because the way we improve our products and services is a direct result of a continuous interaction with our clients and partners. Even though we’re very highly automated and technology based, one of the core elements of our corporate values is to maintain and improve where necessary that personal interaction, even with our liquidity counterparts, because our principal business objective is to be the best facilitator in the global capital markets. So we want to make sure we’re providing the best to our clients and partners; we’re providing the best quality service and products at the same time as maintaining highly effective partnerships with some of the top liquidity counterparts so that they see Saxo bank as a very profitable, very effective deployment strategy for their own businesses in securing strong flows, volumes and earnings through online investment trading. We’re servicing a space that they wouldn’t normally be able to service, and by using Saxo as an effective distribution channel they secure access to that capital investment market from their side. This, certainly, has been a significant consideration in maintaining the quality of product range and service capability to the clients externally and maintain those relationships we’ve worked very hard to build up over the last ten or more years.
“Internally, it’s all about scalability. Making sure we create an environment where our people can grow, where they can feel empowered with the technology, the tools and ongoing training with which to continue coming forward not only with good ideas, but also to be able to engage with the clients, partners – liquidity counterparts – for everyone to see that Saxo bank is at the leading edge of quality products and services and online investment trading. So that, definitely, has been a huge challenge for us, internally, to get the right blend of employees to ensure we have a corporate personnel development policy and environment using role models and very transparent and equitable performance measurement scheme.”
Could you expand a little on the employee role model scheme – it sounds very enlightened?
“Yes. We’ve embraced a couple of very important philosophies. One being Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist and liberationist thinker who wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead – a philosophy of objectivism espousing the belief that people should choose their own values and actions by way of reason; we very much feel that’s a core element of how we see things from a Saxo Bank perspective. And the other philosophy we embrace is that of Jack Welch. He was a phenomenally successful and innovative CEO of General Electric for twenty years whose straight-forward and simple approach to growing a highly profitable business is one that we certainly identify with. Obviously we take these processes and adapt them internally – putting in many of our own ideas – to build an environment that really grasps the opportunity an exciting venture such as Saxo Bank can present to them. As a company, we tend not to follow the typical working patterns. For instance, we truly don’t limit our people in not being able to think further than their station, or assume responsibility further than what we’ve asked them to do, and so on. We do this by defining a very circumspect personal development model which encourages our personnel to be as good as they can be in a specific area, whilst presenting them an opportunity to expand their career; keep those opportunities open, give them coaches, identify the top performers and empower them in turn to be role models and coaches for the others which, hopefully, becomes a cyclical environment that drives the whole growth and business development a lot more efficiently. Like our business philosophy in general, growth – whether it’s empowering staff to achieve great things, or engaging more partners and being closer to them – the key emphasis is a very simple exercise, with straight-forward strategies that nevertheless require very diligent planning.”
More information about Saxo Bank can be found by visiting www.saxobank.com
